July marks the end of Nicole Ulanday’s term as one of EUDiF’s diaspora youth interns. A creative writing in Filipino graduate and self-confessed bibliophile, Nicole worked together with Diana Hincu, EUDiF’s senior project manager, to create a diaspora book nook: a curated collection of literary works exploring diaspora and migration.

Earlier this year, the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) signed an agreement with the Philippine Board on Books for Young People, hoping to do something rather ambitious with an otherwise bureaucratic partnership: get young members of the Filipino diaspora reading.

“My dream is to help the young members of the Filipino diaspora discover our rich literature,” CFO chairperson Dante Ang II said when the memorandum was announced, describing the effort as a “bridge” connecting literature to youth, particularly for second- and third-generation migrants who were raised outside the country. With this, my assumption that literature can hold a person’s two homes in the same hand is strengthened.

What counts as diasporic literature

One of my first idols, my professor in Literature and Society, Mr. Amado Anthony “Arlo” Mendoza III, once made us listen to sloppy Filipino rap songs from the late 2010s, then spent a full two hours making us sit with one question: can what you just listened to be called “literature”? I had no answer until the very end, when he finally said, of course they are. But that was never really the point. The real questions, he said, are: are they good? And which literature do you consume?

Terry Eagleton reinforces this as he opened his own attempt to answer the question “what is literature?” by arguing that literature has no single, fixed definition, since what counts as literature has always changed depending on the period and the community doing the judging. What stays constant, in his account, is only the act of a reader deciding that a text has earned its keep. Diasporic literature is a testament to this.

As one recent study of the genre observes, displaced writers keep returning to the same material because displacement leaves them holding it: an identity worked out across more than one country, a memory that will not quite settle. Jhumpa Lahiri, whose words the study borrows, has said that the things people in exile miss are the things that make them who they are, which is not far from a working definition of the genre itself.

Tahmima Anam, cited alongside her, adds the other half of the equation: a story stays only half told until a reader on the far side of it finishes the telling. Diasporas may give literature a subject. Literature may give diasporas a shared language or may shape what it means to belong to a diaspora. It is this reciprocity that our newest publication seeks to hold.

A nook you can call home

Picture this: a corner in a room where there are select books in a small shelf and a single chair for you to stay and read at. This book nook is exactly that, except digital. And the pieces you will come across are readings gathered from the EUDiF team and alumni arranged around what home actually asks of the people still negotiating it.

Home has usually been described as a place. This publication, following Diana’s advice, asks readers to try instead, to see home as a verb; as something that we keep doing.

Now, reader, before you step into this book nook, let me offer you how I define diaspora literature, inspired by Elaine Castillo’s foreword to Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the heart. To me, diaspora literature represents. Not only the language you speak, the people you know, the town you call home. It makes you feel real. Not just depicted, but, above all, centred.

We hope this book nook, and literature in general, deepens the world for you inasmuch as it deepens you for the world.

Home is a verb: Pages from the diaspora is yours now.